…and writing about it too

Cue obligatory ‘not dead’ post. Since I’ve mostly been working on the editor recently I’ve really had nothing to post about here. Perhaps I should post stuff about the editor here too, or something.

I’ve also realised lately that it has been 9 months since I first started the project, and I really don’t have quite as much of it done as I would have liked. Not that I have any kind of deadline or anything, but I’ve been thinking perhaps I should be setting some for myself. I have for my editor and it’s been coming along quickly as of late because of it. At least I think so, could also be just because I’m enjoying it :P. So, with that said, I hereby declare that I shall have some kind of playable demo released before the end of 2010. Pwomise!

Whew, just implemented Doom64-like sector colouring, where you can specify a floor and ceiling colour for a sector and the walls will blend between them. Probably a bit hard to explain like that so here’s a screenshot:

Next I think I’m going to go about implementing a basic HUD, then start to play around with the stats/attributes system. I have some basic ideas so far, when more is done I’ll list the details here.

So I recently went about starting on the implementation of some map formatting stuff, and so far I’ve implemented texture offsets and scaling, yays. Next up is the colour stuff I think, though I’m not sure how I’m going to handle it overall, we’ll see. Anyway I figure it’s been a while since I posted any kind of screenshot (the last one is rather old), so here’s one demonstrating texture scaling (exciting I know :P):

So yeah I kind of like the idea of these frequent-but-short posts, I think I’ll try to keep it up. I also want to start thinking about some game mechanics stuff soon too, and get some kind of basic HUD/UI happening. Maybe next time… 😛

Another small update to mention that I just added gravity and jumping to the engine 🙂 After a bit of tweaking I think I’m pretty happy now with how the player movement feels, although I think jumping while running actually makes you move faster 😛 Nothing that can’t be offset via some tweaking or a game mechanic (stamina anyone?) though, hehe. Anyway I think after my last few attempts at getting the ‘hard stuff’ done I’m going to focus more on minor things in the engine, and the map editing part of my editor, so I can actually get stuff done. Hopefully I’ll have something other than single-textured maps to show by the end of the year, if all goes well…

Just a quick post to say that I am still alive 😛 The project is too, just not progressing particularly quickly at the moment. I hope to implement at least a few minor things soon though so I’ll update about that when it happens 🙂

Figured it’s about time I updated, no the project isn’t dead 😛 Recently I started on an ‘actor’ system for the engine, and converted the ‘player’ to it. So now when the movement keys are pressed, the player actor is moved around and the camera set to the player’s view, rather than just moving the camera around. I even got some basic acceleration physics stuff in hehe. This lead on to implementing mouselook, which was a bit of a pain to implement actually because SDL is retarded and generates unwanted mouse move events when warping the mouse pointer (something that has to be done, so that the pointer doesn’t leave the game window when you’re trying to look around :P).

Also I started on some basic collision detection stuff – detecting where the floor is underneath an object. So now the player actor is ‘stuck’ to the floor (since I haven’t actually implemented any kind of ‘gravity’ yet). It has some problems though, like in special circumstances you can fall through the floor, but I have some ideas as to how to fix that.

Apart from that I’ve mostly been working on the editor for it, which is coming along slowly but surely. I’m just working on the basics for now, and mostly doom-related things rather than JaDE stuff, but I’ll get there eventually. As I said before I need to do a lot of thinking about how things will work, as I plan not to rewrite the editor again 😛 (It’s currently in it’s 4th incarnation hehe, not counting the resource editor part which was in it’s second before I decided to merge them). Maybe one day I’ll write about the history behind them. If I can be bothered.

Since last post I’ve made a little progress with JaDE. I finally made up my mind how the rendering system will work, and implemented something closer to a final method for rendering the 3d map, yay. The last textured screenshot showed textures on walls/floors but with no texture coordinates (at least, not proper ones). Now texture coordinates are calculated correctly, and instead of calculating the wall polygons on the fly, they are generated the first time a wall is drawn and saved so they don’t have to be recalculated each frame. It also stores some other information, colours for example – it’s possible to have coloured walls (one colour per vertex 😛 I tested this out by making it generate random colours per vertex hehe, it looked… interesting). I also plan to allow per-vertex colouring in the map format somehow, so yeah.

After implementing that I decided to go ahead with the editor. A while back I started on a new rewrite of my SLADE map editor, SLADE3. Rather than begin an editor for the engine from scratch, I’ll be continuing SLADE3 instead. So not only will I be writing the editor for JaDE, but a nice editor for Doom too. Now, while it’d be nice and (somewhat) easy to write just a map editor, I’ve decided to go the slow and painful route of writing an all-round editor 😛 As in, it will be a combination of a wad/game resource editor and a map editor. I’ll be able to create pretty much everything for the game with it. On the downside, though, it’s going to be a huge undertaking, and it’s not exactly something that’s been done before – very well anyway. So I have the added difficulty of having to design it right – not so simple considering how complex it will be. Fun stuff.